Microsoft Research India: 2012 in Review

At Microsoft Research India, 2012 began the same way all years do—with our annual Technical Advisory Board meeting and TechVista, which this time was in the lovely city of Kolkata at the Science City, a perfect place for a symposium on research and careers in research. We were overwhelmed by the enthusiasm of the more than 1,800 students who attended the event—there is, indeed, something to the reputation of Kolkata as a place of high culture and scholarship!

The year continued with great research and publications, one highlight being five papers at STOC 2012, a significant achievement for a small lab. We also had some outstanding individual achievements I would like to mention. Saikat Guha received MIT TR35 recognition, and Neeraj Kayal was awarded the Indian National Science Academy Medal for Young Scientists. And as this blog post was nearing publication, we learned that we had a wonderful holiday gift: Vipul Goyal has been recognized by Forbes as one of its 30 Under 30 in Science and Healthcare.

Our researchers continue to be busy serving the research community in various ways. Ganesan Ramalingam was nominated to serve as vice president of the Indian Association for Research in Computing Science Council and was elected to the ACM India Council. Venkat Padmanabhan was asked to serve as a panelist by the Government of India’s IT Research Academy (ITRA) to evaluate the inaugural set of R&D proposals submitted to ITRA.

We also are excited to welcome a number of new members to our team, especially Muthu Muthukrishnan as a principal researcher. Muthu was a professor at Rutgers prior to joining us and is known for his work and passion about online economics, especially in the area of computational advertising. Muthu is also a very interesting person outside of research, with a colorful personality—a writer, a poet, and an artist besides being a researcher. Learn more on his blog.

Overall, it has been another fun year, and we are looking forward to the next!